[outworlder]

> The Steam client is terrible. Unresponsive, un-intuitive, and surprisingly bad for searching in as well.

I can only agree with the last one. It works fine for, you know, downloading and playing games. It rarely ever has issues.

The store could use some work, but it does a better job than, say, Apple App Store – the discovery queue has shown me titles I would have never seen before, as did the curators.

Have you tried the competition?

[fhood]

Steam's only real purpose is as a store right? I can open an executable pretty well most of the time. And Steam makes enough money through said store that I think they need to be held to the standards of Amazon, rather than their contemporaries.

[shadowgovt]

Store, purchase tracker, platform identification system, and analytics engine to push data on game performance and hardware configuration back to the Steam service itself as a mass aggregator so they can keep their finger on the "pulse" of real PC deployments and thereby come quite close to solving the problem that was once the bane of the entire industry ("Game doesn't work on my PC because drivers").

I think people tend to overlook how valuable Steam has been as a clearinghouse to aggregate that last piece of data.